Too many passengers were bringing their own headsets, so US Airways has discontinued in-flight movies. US Airways had been hoping to switch from their heavy 500lb movie system to lightweight fiber optic personal systems, but that plan has also been axed. New US Airways planes will be delivered with no entertainment system.

Sales of $5 headsets “has gone off a cliff” according to a US Airways spokesperson. “What was economical 18 months ago is not economical today,” he said. “The things we were looking at for tomorrow, in general, have had to be put on hold.”

US Airways has already discontinued free snacks, started charging $2 for beverages that were formerly complimentary, and added a $15 fee to check one bag and an additional $25 fee to check a second bag.

But Sir you must wear the seatbelt it is the law… yes fastening the seatbelt is free, but as I am telling you there is a $50 charge to enable it to be unfastened. If you pay this fee before we depart then you can avoid the $100 seat rental fee for the extra time it will take to process your payment upon arrival…

Do airlines really still try to sell you headsets? When I’m on an airplane, damned near everyone has–at the very least–their own iPod earbuds. And a growing number of people have noise canceling headphones. You know, so you can actually hear the movie. The days of people wanting to wear someone else’s skanky headphones are long gone.

Apparently, US Airways’ answer to this reality is “Fine, we’ll take our ball and go home.”

Ouch. This is painful. My parents just flew Austrian Airlines from Dulles to Vienna, using United Airlines points.

Coach class: Free alcohol (all you want), personal large video screens, video games, personal movie selection (10 movies), and according to my frequent-flying dad, the largest coach seats he had ever seen. Not to mention a staff that didn’t hate their jobs.

US Airways has become “the city bus” with wings. No amenities, hyper-inflated pricing and adversarial attitude towards customers.

The Lack of in-flight entertainment could be a big deterrent to a lot of travelers on 2+ hour flights. The pervasiveness of iPods and like mean most travelers will have a set of headphones with them, modeling your entertainment profit strategy on the assumption they wont is pointless.

Flights that have individual entertainment systems at each seat and charge per viewing are a MUCH better model. On a 6 Hour flight, I purchased 2 $5 movies on one of these systems. Used my own iPod Headset and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I had a choice in what I wanted to watch, and even had “free” TV programs as well as in-flight status with GPS navigation over a map with Airspeed and ETA at my finger tips, all on a 7″ screen in front of me.Beats having your head cocked sideways watching the 20 year old TV hanging down in the middle of isle.

US Airways is the airline that just refuses to die like it should. Nothing they do seems to help, pretty soon we’ll be seeing coin operated bathrooms and it’s just a matter of time before the pilots corporate card will be declined and he’ll have a collection in the main cabin to pay for the fuel.

@ophmarketing: Airtran still sells headsets to use with their in-flight XM radio, but the plug is a standard stereo plug so you can use your own headphones. If you do end up buying their headphones, they encourage you to take the headphones with you :-)

I liked being able to use my headphones with the radio, the problem was that whenever an announcement was made over the speakers, it also came in through the headphones, and their volume was much louder than the radio. I had to take my headphones off (they’re in-ear styled) just to avoid the ear blasts.

Guess I’m glad I’m moving to Atlanta to deal with Delta instead of Charlotte and dealing with US Air…

The way Delta used to have it, with Song (and I guess JetBlue has), everyone had their own display, and you could pay $5 for a movie from a varied selection, was the best. It keeps everyone occupied (kids included), which made the flight quieter, people were less stressed (and bored), and it was just a much more pleasant experience.

After flying on Jet Blue for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try not to fly the regular airlines much anymore if possible. As much decent free food and soft drinks throughout the flight as I wanted, free DirecTV, free XM radio (I prefer Sirius but can’t be too picky…) and friendly staff. As long as they dont incarcerate you on a tarmacked plane for hours, how can you go wrong (and it was cheaper than the legacies for non-stop from IAD to SAN). Oh yea- bigger seats too :)

@backbroken: No kidding. I was thinking of bringing a DVD player with me on my flight anyway because, really, staring off into space is infinitely better than staring at Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey act like wide-eyed morons for 2 hours.

I’m guessing this is the total weight of the system which would be the video player + all TVs + all cabling to bring audio to every seat + amplifiers for those.

The cabling is not to be overlooked as a significant source of system weight. It seems like just a few small wires but multiply that by something like 10-20 feet for every seat on the plane and it adds up fast. Plus I’m sure there’s some shielding requirements to prevent interference from/with flight electronics.

@crabbyman6: And every passenger will now lug aboard an additional 2-3 lbs of personal entertainment equipment and programming (DVDs) rendering any savings of fuel by removing the 500 pound entertainment system null and void.

Alaska air has a personal movie player filled with movies and tv shows that you can rent for like 10 bucks and includes headphones, that they don’t want back. Its pretty slick actually, because they have the featured movie, plus a few others, so plenty for adults and kids, as well as cartoons and other items. Its an optional item and it works very well, which beats getting random episodes of Wings and Cheers on the big screen.

Glad I own a laptop…and a PSP…and a media phone…and a portable DVD player…

I don’t really remember ever enjoying the horrible movies they ever offered during a flight anyways. From what I remember, they were most commonly romantic comedies, or a movie that was equally annoying or edited to oblivion to make it G/PG rated.

@sir_eccles: That used to be the norm. Some airlines even used air tubes to conduct the sound, rather than wires and speakers.

I dunno, it could be worse — American bombards you with “CBS Eye on American” and infomercials for DVD-based board games, hosted by Kristin Holt. The only thing worse than watching a year-old episode of CSI is watching a year and a half-old Entertainment Tonight “Special” about the year-old episode of CSI that’s coming up Next! Of course, that presumes that the 1950s-era “entertainment system” works, as it, the air conditioning, cabin lighting and #2 engine invariably are in need of maintenance, which was scheduled to happen last week, but was deferred for six more months. (Oh, and don’t try to lean your seat back, it seems they frequently forget to bolt the seat back to the seat bottom — as was my wife’s seat coming back from our honeymoon — so, you essentially have a stool, and no seatbelt.)

Mercifully, my two upcoming long haul flights (San Diego and Vegas, out of NY) are both on Virgin America routes. The best part is that once you factor in the extra fees the legacy carriers charge, it’s not even that much more expensive.

@Ash78: The foreign carriers almost all have better customer service. We should open up our domestic routes to them.

@crabbyman6: The article says they’ll remove them when they do other maintenance. It makes sense. The actual cost of running the system is almost nothing, but 500 extra pounds per plane adds up to a significant amount of extra fuel burned.

@jtheletter: ooh, good call, I didn’t even think of the shielding, I bet that adds a significant amount of weight. Are they going to be removing the TVs too, all the flights I was on they used those to show the emergency procedures and such. Maybe if they used LCDs instead of tube TVs they’d be a bit lighter.

USAirways will never die. A large portion of the Federal Teachers Pension Fund (or something like that) is tied up in US Airways stock. The gov’t will never let this airline die out. Personally, I severed ties with this terrible company a few months ago after a nearly year -long battle over them taking double the miles out of my account for a rewards flight. I actually sent my FF card in the mail to them and told them that I was through with their crap.

My first experience with USAir was an emergency landing at Buffalo after they didn’t fill the plane with enough fuel in Toronto.

Things just got less worse with future experiences such as a canceled flight at LGA, but we have one at JFK and we won’t pay for the cab. Your luggage, well you’ll get it eventually.

And of course the logic of going from St. Louis to LaGauardia via Charlotte. TWA was around at the time and the person who made the arrangements knew nothing of air travel and how TWA would have meant a direct flight.

Folks, we’re talking about flying buses here and the companies that run them. When it costs $300 to fly cross country then the airline that sells you that $300 ticket is going to charge you for baggage, drinks, and probably in the future the air you breath. If you want a pleasant traveling experience than save your pennies and lease a private jet.One way or another, stop bitching.

The last time I flew I watched my own movies on my iPod, so I don’t really care.

In fact, this is probably a good thing…

On the older planes without seatback screens, it always bugs me how they make you pull down your window shade and sit in the dark even if you don’t want to sleep or watch the movie, and the movie invariably stinks anyway.

And even on newer planes with individual screens, the move video/audio quality is usually not so good, and even though you have choices, it’s still choices between several sucky movies. The screens usually do offer other distractions like games and shopping, but the games tend to be lame and the shopping’s pointless.

This doesn’t really bother me. I never really watch the movies as I hate that they are usually edited, cropped and hard for me to see on such small screens. My girlfriend loves them though so she’ll hate this. I also don’t like the free preview over the PA system so I will welcome the peace and quiet.

For every person that complains about having to pay for checking their over-sized bags, lack of snacks, drinks and movies I should hope there’s one that worries that if the airlines keep losing money they may fold and cut air travel options to their local airport. I’m one of the latter.

Ordering new planes sans entertainment systems is one of the worst ideas. The cost to install these things at time of purchase has to be less expensive than attempting to retrofitting it to a plane (except for major interior overhauls, but those are usually 5-10 years out).

I’m with loganmo. I fly JetBlue exclusively now. Fortunately I’m just doing FLNYC flights so JetBlue’s NYC-centric view of air travel works for me. Unlimited drinks & food (‘though alcohol is still $), DirecTV+XM and actual legroom makes the flight enjoyable. Now if JetBlue could just rid themselves of the TSA…

@prag: The solution to this problem is pure & simple — you can’t sell a product at a price you can’t make a profit on. The airlines need to raise their damn prices and be done with it. Ideally, the airlines need to raise their prices AND raise their level of service.

Good service breeds loyalty, moreso than those near-useless neutered frequent flyer programs the airlines have now.

@sharkd: OMG, air tubes, I’d forgotten about those!! I just had a serious flashback to my sister and flying PanAm as little kids and blowing into the plug end of the tube headphones while the other was wearing them….

“Ouch, this is definitely the nail in the coffin for me. Flight longer than 3 hours without in-flight movies? Fuck that. I’d rather pull out my toenails with pliers.”

That’s a good idea, but I don’t think they allow pliers through security.

@Ash78: I recently took a trip flying on Aeromexico, LAN Chile, and Delta. The foreign airlines hat GREAT service, the plane cabins were spotlessly clean, and the booze and on-demand movies were free for the whole flight. Delta, on the other hand, charged for food, drinks, and movies, and the planes were pretty grubby. The flight staff were still friendly though.

Here is what I don’t understand – why are some airlines trying to act like credit card companies with all these hidden fees. If they need to charge you to check a bag, build it into the ticket price. If you need to charge $5 for headphones, build it into the ticket price. This nickel and diming of the public is just more annoying. I know the airlines are hurting but this is just hurting them more. It all started when they lobbied against a passenger’s bill of rights.

Instead of just increasing prices, they are annoying their customer base and then they wonder why they have irate passengers.

Last month I went to South Asia on “Emirates” (one way 15hrs + 5hrs = 20 hrs) and the service was wonderful.
Coach class:
Unlimited Free Drinks & alcohol
Personal TV with more than 100 movies (some of them were released about 3-4 months ago)
Better quality and quantity in food
Comfortable seats

I will fly in a US based air line only for domestics flights, that also because there are no international carriers operating domestically.

Ahh the ‘Free Market’, where quality goes down, prices go up, and no amount of competition will ever matter so long as the company has enough money to pay for marketing. Nothing like being slaves to private companies, with no say over an industry that is vital to many of our lives, jobs, and our economy.

Can we have our passengers bill of rights now please? And maybe some regulation so these assholes stop externalizing their costs on to us.

Oh, you made stupid business decisions, and now you need a government bail out, and then to jack up your prices, bringing tourism and travel economies all over the country to a near stand still? Well tough shit, how about we force YOU to eat the loss, and maybe keep the economy strong enough where people can still afford to fly (vs a rise in “staycations”, and other stupid euphemisms for being too poor to even take a vacation).

Weddings, funerals and business: the only reasons I get on a plane anymore. I used to love flying, too. There are many, many places I want to visit that require flying, but until the airlines get their heads out of their asses, I am done.

@LankanDude: My mom flew Emirates to Dubai last year and she could not say enough about the airline. She damn near offered to buy me a ticket to Dubai just so I could fly Emirates. She has traveled extensively and she claims Emirates is the best international airline, hands down.

For years I’ve been using my MP3 player and PDA with a half dozen ebooks, games, and a few movies or TV shows as MPEG files. The stuff I take is infinitely more entertaining than the crap airlines offer.

I can’t be bothered with (and don’t want to be bothered by) third rate movies and endless promotions. And as others have mentioned, the damn announcements on their systems are usually twice as loud as the “feature” they interrupt.

The only good thing about movies on a plane is that nobody has a cell phone turned on.

@Kanti_V2: the problem is this isn’t really a free market. First, its very very difficult to starty up a new airline. Look at all the hoops Virgin America had to jump through before its service started. Second, even if you get an airline started, you have to be able to fly somewhere. The legacies control most of the slots at major airports, meaning many newer airlines have problems even getting access to the market. This problem could be alleviated if we actually upgraded our air traffic control systems or built new airports or runways, but again this hasn’t happened. Finally, the airlines know the government will bail them out, and they make decisions accordingly.

All of these problems are not the “free market,” and indeed are problems directly caused by the government’s ineptitude. The last thing we need is more regulations to “fix” the system.

I agree with your last sentiments: “Well tough shit, how about we force YOU to eat the loss.” That would be a great first step to getting back to a true free market, where people who wanted great service would pay more for it, and people who like the nickle and diming could choose that option instead.

@mrdot: What you’re saying is that, due to limited airport gates and the like, airlines are not in a market where significant competition is possible. If that’s true, the only real solution to protect consumers would be to regulate it like we do other natural monopolies (power utilities, for example.)

Now, I’m not sure that’s really true. Southwest has had great success pushing its way into the market. A lot of the problems US Air is having now are due to them having to compete with new budget carriers such as Southwest.

@ophmarketing: yeah they do because they have those proprietary dual-plug headsets. when i was on us airways, the domestic flight to PHL (thank goodness my checked-in luggage wasn’t lost) only had dual-plug outlets so i was completely hopeless. the international flight however, had both dual-plug and the standard mini-jack outlets.

in one of the my flights, i actually had one of those old bulky entertainment systems right above me in the luggage compartment. i first thought it was the black box for the plane and i’m thinking to myself, why would it be there? and why are the flight attendants messing with it. then i realized it was the entertainment system. when looking up close, i found out it was using betamax! my god that’s old.

@AtomikB: really? Last time I flew AeroMexico it was AWFUL. Dirty, unkempt plane and they served TUNA FISH SANDWICHES. Do you know how disgusting it is to be stuck for 3 hours on a plane that reeks of tuna? The several times I flew before weren’t much better.

@Orv: You are correct that regulation is needed in these situations- but the real problem is HOW the finite resources at these airports are distributed. Gaining gate access is a huge barrier to new airlines. In an ideal world, if a new airline with cheaper service and a better product were to enter a market, it should shortly have a control over the market. Gate restrictions pretty much guarentee that couldn’t happen in the real world. Only after a legacy’s gate lease ends, which can be years, and the legacy chooses not to renew the lease (which it might not do, even if it doesn’t really need the gate, to avoid the new competition) do new gates become available.

@prag: Continental just cut it’s flights from my local airport and from the next town over. Now it’s just American Eagle for both of them and they’re cutting down the flights per day. I too am afraid of losing service at my local airport. The next closest airport is 2.5 hours in either direction, with $10+/day parking fees.

I’m taking a trip to London next month on US Air, so this kind of sucks for me. I probably would have gone with another airline, but there was some sort of one-day special where the ticket price was about $500 cheaper than normal. Otherwise, I would be exchanging my tickets right now for another airline.

Is it possible to just watch a movie on your iPod or on a small portable DVD player or notebook computer instead? Do they allow those in use on flights now? I remember they played the movie Ronin on my flight and I was just nine, than the following movie had nudity and sex scenes. Strange.

Damn, they were just (hahahaha…*just*) $2 last year. Yea, I know, recession, blah blah blah. Seriously, I travel with my mp3 player (and other mobile tech) so I always have headphones with me. Paying $5 for some 99 cent store earbuds is crazy.

@12-Inch Idongivafuck Sandwich: The Song planes with nice seats and personal screens are still around, they’re just part of the Delta fleet now. I almost always get one flying in/out of JFK or LAX, and lately I’ve had them on the PHL-ATL route as well. My favorite feature is the ability to play slightly outdated trivia against my fellow passengers.

I read on flights, or at least I try to, but sometimes the lighting is wonky or the turbulence gives me a headache or similar. The latter is what happened last time I flew–I was being jostled around and trying to read under those conditions was quite annoying, so I opted to watch the movie. That was no less annoying, unfortunately, as the movie was “Blades of Glory.”

I just wish I could bring my sewing on board, but I didn’t want them to confiscate my needles for fear of embroidery-based terrorism. Next time… the DS, definitely.

pretty soon it will be more econ to just ship our luggage a few days to the location that we are going to be at. or overnite it there as we fly lol. this gas price thing is affecting so much its unreal.

In a world where nearly everyone (at least those that can afford airline tickets) has an ipod and/or a laptop, why would anyone want to be at the mercy of the airlines to decide what crappy movies we get to watch while stuck on a long flight. I get about 3 hours of battery time on my laptop and 6+ of video on my ipod – I fully load them both before international flights,

I ruined Pirates of the Caribbean for my boyfriend a couple Christmases ago. I had a stomach virus and was puking the whole way home on the plane. Now every time he sees it, he just thinks of that awful day I puked my guts up (to the point of blood, ew), then got him sick too. ;)

What is not mentioned here is how much money does an airline have to pay to
show a film on their entertainment system. If they are anything like movie
theaters, the theater doesn’t make any money on the admission ticket. They
make their money at the concession stand. I’d bet that the airline has to
pay out the nose for the film, no matter how many passengers are on the
plane, or how many watch the film.

Perhaps the MPAA and the airlines had a revenue guarantee that promised the
studio X-bucks, recooped from headset rentals. If they airline doesn’t rent
enough headsets (admission), then they have to pay the difference.

Don’t forget, showing those crappy films on the airline does cost them
money, and probably a lot more than you think it should. You know how greedy
the MPAA is.